SAP user group’s Cooper: Indirect licensing progress welcome but slow

In the year ahead we will need to see more progress from SAP on indirect licensing, along with more communication about C/4 Hana, says SAP UK & Ireland User Group (UKISUG) chair Paul Cooper.

Indirect licensing – a term well recognised by SAP customers, which means use cases involving non-SAP software but where SAP could have a case to demand licence revenue connected with the use of its software in combination with that of others, Salesforce’s as an instance – remains a thorny issue for users. Nevertheless, SAP customers do find the supplier becoming more transparent, and are advancing their own progress to adopting SAP’s full enterprise resource planning (ERP) S/4 Hana suite, though mostly on-premise, not in the cloud.

Cooper briefed Computer Weekly at the UK and Ireland SAP User Group conference in November 2018. What follows is an edited version of that interview.

Well, there is some time to go till 2025, and SAP has moved customers off older versions [of ERP systems] before. But this one is slightly different in that in reality SAP is pitching a different product. And there are different routes to doing the upgrade; some things aren’t there, and do you go with [the cloud-based] SuccessFactors for HR or payroll, for instance?